By IANS
Guadalupe (Peru) : More than two weeks after a massive earthquake devastated Peru’s southern Pacific coast, jittery residents continue to be frightened by frequent aftershocks while trying to get on with their lives amid the rubble of their demolished homes, the Spanish news agency EFE said.
The magnitude-8.0 temblor on Aug 15 left 519 people dead, 1,366 injured and more than 71,000 families homeless, especially in the cities of Ica, Pisco and Chincha but also in nearby small towns south of Lima.
The survivors now must cope with lack of sanitation services, psychological scars and the impossibility of returning to their workplaces, given that many of them simply no longer exist.
They must also endure constant post-quake aftershocks, which, according to the latest figures from the Peru Geophysics Institute’s director of seismology, Hernando Tavera, now total more than 3,000.
While rescue and clean-up crews have cleared all the rubble from the main roads of the affected cities, this is not the case in several small towns, where inhabitants must survive among the ruins of their destroyed houses or in tents set up in vacant lots where buildings once stood.
Such is the situation in the small town of Guadalupe, 290 km south of Lima on the Pan American Highway, where more than 90 percent of the homes were destroyed, 19 people perished, 80 suffered injuries and 10,000 were left homeless.
Assistance for victims in those areas “has been partial or practically nil”, the local coordinator of Medicins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), Spaniard Juan Encinas, told EFE.
“There are no places where people can wash up, there are no latrines, there are no shelters like those installed in Pisco (the most devastated city and the destination for most of the national and international aid),” said Encinas, who added that amid these privations the survivors have assumed a “spirit of fatalism”.
“At the emotional level, the children have been quite affected, they stop you in the street to ask if your house also fell down, they ask for pills to sleep. That’s understandable two days after the earthquake, but two weeks have passed,” the MSF coordinator said.
Although electricity was restored in Guadalupe five days after the quake, water still is only available for a maximum of two or three hours a day and, due to a lack of shelter, families – many of whose members have injuries – must sleep outside amid the few remaining walls, which shake with each aftershock.
Indeed, it was in that village, just 10 km north of the city of Ica, where a woman gave birth Monday amid the rubble and her baby died at night from the cold, Encinas told EFE.
Meanwhile, the recently appointed coordinator of the Fund for the Reconstruction of the South, Julio Favre, said Tuesday that he hopes to be able to deliver the first houses to people in the devastated areas within “five or six months”, the state news agency Andina reported.
Favre, who also guaranteed “the adequate and efficient administration of the resources”, said that the government already has made an assessment of what is needed for reconstruction.
Another of the objectives of the Fund, an organization set up by the government and composed of ministers, business leaders, mayors and regional leaders of the affected zones, is the reestablishment of economic activity in the area within one year.
In this regard, Peruvian President Alan Garcia reiterated his call for investors and business leaders to turn their attention to Peru.
“Our country keeps advancing. With or without an earthquake, Peru is progressing, Peru is growing, Peru is creating more employment and is doing so in a prudent, progressive and accumulative way, which is important. It’s not the leap in the dark of temporary growth, but a prudent, constructive way of accumulating (capital), so that our country can be as we’ve proposed, a leader in South America,” Garcia said.
Although Economy Minister Luis Carranza has lowered Peru’s gross domestic product growth forecast for this year from 7.9 percent to 7.2 percent, he said the country’s economy would continue to be one of the region’s most dynamic.
But for MSF and other aid organisations, the most important thing is to restore dignity and sanitary conditions to the lives of thousands of Peruvians left homeless by the powerful quake.